This winter’s mild flu season has faded to a trickle of cases in much of the U.S., but health officials aren’t ready to call it over.

Since the beginning of the year, positive flu test results and doctor’s office visits for flu-like illness are down. But second waves of influenza are not unusual, and some experts said it’s possible a late winter or spring surge could be coming.

“The question we’re asking ourselves now is: ‘Is this it, or is there more to come?’” said Lynnette Brammer of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Covid-19 cases have been falling, leading to a decline in mask wearing and behaviors that may have been keeping flu down this winter. As people are less cautious, flu or other respiratory viruses can surge, Brammer said.

Read more at NBC News.

A Marine Corps reservist who was charged in last year’s riot at the U.S. Capitol also schemed with a nurse to steal, forge and sell hundreds of fake coronavirus vaccination cards and destroy vaccine doses to fake inoculations, federal authorities said Thursday.

Sgt. Jia Liu, 26, was released on $250,000 bond to home detention with an ankle monitor after a court appearance Thursday. Nurse Steven Rodriguez, 27, was released on $100,000 bond.

“By deliberately distributing fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination cards to the unvaccinated, the defendants put military and other communities at risk of contracting a virus that has already claimed nearly 1 million lives in this country,” Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.

Liu’s lawyer, Benjamin Yaster, declined to comment. A message was left for Rodriguez’ attorney.

Read more at ABC News.

The United States will increase coronavirus vaccine assistance to 11 African nations, officials said on Thursday, in an effort to prevent future variants and bolster inoculation efforts in the least vaccinated continent.

Through the Initiative for Global Vaccine Access, or Global Vax, the Biden administration will provide “intensive financial, technical and diplomatic support” to African countries that have recently shown the capacity to hasten vaccine uptake, according to a statement from Rebecca Chalif, a spokeswoman for the United States Agency for International Development.

The agency said it selected a group of countries in sub-Saharan Africa — Angola, Eswatini, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Lesotho, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia — based on the burden of Covid-19 on their populations, the capacity of their health systems, their readiness to quickly administer vaccine doses in the absence of supply constraints and their ability to effectively deploy additional U.S. investments. The agency had allocated $510 million to support global vaccination programs, and more than half of that funding will be allocated to the first group of African countries.

Read more at The New York Times.

Colorado’s hospitals are expected to get a relative break from COVID-19 over the next few months, but a return to any kind of pre-pandemic normal remains elusive as medical staff deal with burnout and patients now are coming in sicker.

The virus’s omicron variant spread so widely that the state’s modeling team believes that, by the end of this month, the vast majority of Coloradans will have some immunity because they’ve been vaccinated, survived an infection, or both. It’s not clear what will happen as that immunity fades or if new variants develop, but it should keep hospitalizations relatively low for a few months.

While a reprieve from COVID-19 is welcome, it doesn’t mean everything is back to the way it was before the pandemic, said Dr. Anuj Mehta, a critical and pulmonary care physician at Denver Health.

Hospitals need to manage a backlog of patients who didn’t get non-emergency care during previous surges — some of whom may be significantly sicker than they would have been with timely treatment — and they’re trying to do it with fewer nurses and providers, he said.

Read more at The Denver Post.

The rollout of Covid-19 vaccines has laid bare some hard lessons, among them the need to fund the United States’ crumbling public health infrastructure and prioritize equitable access to high-quality health information. But it’s also drawn attention to some long-ignored problems in the way new vaccines and other medical products are studied — including the way researchers evaluate the effects of those products on menstrual cycles.

Like most clinical trials, the 2020 Covid-19 vaccine studies didn’t collect data about menstrual variability among participants. Younger people became eligible for vaccination in early 2021, and as they did, high-profile people — including former Pfizer executive Michael Yeadon and feminist author Naomi Wolf — raised concerns that vaccines could negatively affect reproductive health, often in the name of women’s wellness. Menstruating people worldwide began to ask questions about whether changes in their periods portended more serious changes in their current or future ability to conceive.

Soon after, myths linking Covid-19 vaccines with infertility began spreading with surprising ferocity — facilitated, say experts, by the absence of data addressing the menstrual side effects of vaccination.

Read more at Vox.

This year’s Academy Awards will require proof of COVID-19 vaccination for most — but not all — inside the Dolby Theater, Variety has confirmed.

As the New York Times first reported, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences determined on Thursday that all nominees and invited guests must show proof of vaccination and test negative at least twice via PCR testing. Those performing and presenting at the awards ceremony, on the other hand, will not need to show proof of vaccination, but will be tested rigorously.

This marks a clarification of the Academy’s COVID-19 policy, as it was reported on Feb. 9 that the Oscars would not require attendees to provide proof of vaccination. According to a source close to the situation, the decision to not require proof of vaccination for presenters and performers falls under the COVID-19 return-to-work agreement between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and unions. The agreement gives production companies the option to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for Zone A — the production’s cast and the crew working closest with the actors — but it is not a requirement.

Read more at Variety.

Implicit in the discussion and consternation around vaccine hesitancy has been a wish: If only there were a message that could break through skepticism and persuade unvaccinated people to get their shots. What a world that would be.

But over the past year, this really did happen. While there are still too many holdouts, many people who were skeptical or hesitant changed their minds and got their Covid-19 shots.

A new study by Vincent Pons at the Harvard Business School and Vincenzo Galasso and Paola Profeta at Bocconi University in Milan may help explain why. They found that people can in fact be persuaded by the right message, offering new evidence about the best ways to reach skeptics. Separate analyses have identified other factors, such as seeing other people be safely vaccinated and hearing about the benefits of vaccines from doctors and loved ones.

This study assessed which messages were most effective in increasing people’s willingness to get vaccinated, lessons that could still help advance the goal of vaccinating more people against Covid-19. There is a range of vaccine skepticism — from people who wanted to wait and see before getting their own shots, to the people uncertain about booster shots, to the vaccinated parents of unvaccinated but eligible children. Successful messaging could help in winning them over and may be instructive for future public health campaigns as well.

Read more at Vox.

When Ashley Shew turned up for an appointment at a medical centre in spring 2020, a member of staff told her she could remove her mask because only people with pre-existing conditions were vulnerable to COVID-19. Shew was surprised. “A hard-of-hearing amputee battered by chemotherapy and more”, as she describes herself, she is a regular at the centre — the appointment that day concerned her prosthetic leg. Who, she wondered, did the staff member think counted as a person with pre-existing conditions?

The invisibility of disability is not new, says Shew, a 38-year-old philosopher who explores the intersection of technology and disability at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. “But it is particularly deadly that we don’t frame COVID-19 as a disability issue,” she says. “Even linguistically we’re pointed away from it. ‘Pre-existing conditions’ is a way of not saying ‘disability’.”

From the beginning of this pandemic, people with disabilities understood that the disease would target them and would swell their ranks. Disability historians knew that there was a penumbra of ill health to previous mass-death events. Health economists warned that, as with tuberculosis, HIV and other diseases, morbidity would stalk mortality. Too many others have clung stubbornly to a belief that COVID-19 is something from which a minority of people die, and that most bounce back quickly and intact, with only their immune system updated. The longer the pandemic drags on, the harder it is to maintain that fiction.

Read more at Nature.

High school junior Nicolas Montero stays busy. He runs track, works night and weekend shifts at Burger King and keeps on top of his schoolwork at Neshaminy High School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

But Montero’s packed schedule is also strategic — he says it’s a way to stay out of the house.

Montero and his parents are separated by a political and cultural rift common throughout the U.S.: He says his parents are part of a small but vocal minority who oppose COVID-19 vaccination and have refused to let him get the shots.

“The thing about these beliefs is that they alternate by the day,” said Montero, who is 16. “It’s not one solid thing that they’re going with, so it’s just really baseless. It’s like one thing they see on Facebook, and then they completely believe it.”

The impasse eventually led to an act of quiet defiance: Montero traveled to Philadelphia, where a little-known city regulation permits children age 11 or older to be vaccinated without parental consent.

Read more at NPR.

Like many employers over the past year, LeMoyne-Owen College has felt the whiplash of changing vaccination rules.

Three times in the past six months, the historically Black institution in Memphis had to change its guidance, first requiring employees to get at least one COVID-19 shot in August 2021, and most did. A few months later, the Tennessee legislature effectively banned employers from instituting vaccine requirements. The college complied.

By the end of 2021, however, their guidance changed, this time as the federal government implemented its own requirements on workplaces with more than 100 employees. Then, once again, the vaccine requirement was dropped when the Supreme Court in January said the administration’s rule could not be enforced, and the administration withdrew the rule.

Read more at PBS News.